Week of September 12, 2011: AmerisourceBergen Completes the Acquisition of IntrinsiQ; Xcelience Expands its Manufacturing and Packaging Services; and More

Sep 15, 2011

By Pharmaceutical Technology Editors

ePT--the Electronic Newsletter of Pharmaceutical Technology

Company Notes

Alkermes, a biotechnology company, has announced that the company’s shareholders have approved the merger of Alkermes and Elan Drug Technologies, the drug formulation and manufacturing business unit of Elan Corporation. Both businesses will be combined under the name “Alkermes plc,” a newly formed company based in Ireland. Alkermes anticipates that the business combination will close on Sept. 16, 2011.

The pharmaceutical services provider AmerisourceBergen has completed the acquisition of IntrinsiQ, an informatics solutions provider for oncologists, for $35 million in cash. IntrinsiQ will become part of ION Solutions, which is a unit of AmerisourceBergen Specialty Group.

Dendreon, a biotechnology company, has announced a reduction of approximately 500 employees to meet the company’s manufacturing requirements. The total employee-related cost of the restructuring is expected to be approximately $21 million, of which about $5 million are noncash charges related to stock-based compensation.

The board of the European Fine Chemicals Group (EFCG) has agreed to ratify the proposal of FDA to put forward a legislative package, designed with the help of EFCG and US industry representatives, to deliver into US law a new Generic Drug User Fee Act (GDUFA). GDUFA requires FDA to commit to significantly improve and enhance its regulatory activities for the benefit of global generic-drug providers and US generic-drug users, in exchange for the global generic-drug industry providing FDA with $299 million in user fees each year during the next five years.

The CMO Lonza, announced that LG Acquisition, an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Lonza, has extended the expiration date for its previously announced tender offer for 100% of the outstanding shares of common stock of the biocides company Arch Chemicals to Sept. 30, 2011. The tender offer is at a price of $47.20 per share in cash.

The Pfizer subsidiary Pfizer Animal Health and Jilin Guoyuan Animal Health Company, an animal heath biological products provider, have announced an agreement to jointly develop, manufacture, and distribute animal health vaccines in China. The new joint venture, Jilin Pfizer Guoyuan Animal Health Co., will provide a range of vaccine products to help China’s livestock producers meet increasing demand for a safe and abundant supply of pork, beef, dairy, and poultry from healthy animals. The animal vaccine market in China is valued at $800 million per year. Pfizer Guoyuan Animal Health will focus initially on developing vaccines to protect the health of swine. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Sartorius Stedim Biotech, a biopharmaceutical service provider, has entered into a patent cross-licensing agreement with GE Healthcare Life Sciences. Under the agreement, Sartorius Stedim Biotech has granted GE Healthcare Life Sciences a sublicense to certain patents held by the University of Maryland to which Sartorius Stedim Biotech has access under an exclusive license agreement with Fluorometrix, a spin-off of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. These patent rights cover bioreactors with at least two optical sensors for monitoring biotechnological manufacturing processes. GE Healthcare Life Sciences has granted Sartorius Stedim Biotech a sublicense to patent rights that it has licensed from SciLog. These patent rights cover proprietary technologies for the automated, aseptic transfer of solutions in bioprocessing applications. The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

SGS, a contract analytical and testing firm, has announced plans to expand its service portfolio in its Poitiers, France, facility to include cell-based bioassays. The company has a recruitment plan in place over the next six months to meet customer demand.

The CRO Xcelience expanded its manufacturing and packaging services to include four new pieces of equipment and a new automated packaging line. As part of the expansion, the company added an MG Futura (capsule-filling machine for powder and pellets), an LCI Multi-granulator MG-55 (extruder), a QJ-230T marumerizer (spheronizer), and a wurster insert (bottom spray) to the existing Glatt GPCG-3 fluid-bed processor. These new pieces enable production, coating and encapsulation of MUDF delivery systems. In addition, Xcelience has added a fully automated packaging line (including ink-jet coding) for primary bottling of tablets and capsules. The new packaging line enhances the speed at which batches are packaged, shortens timelines, and enhances the ability to package larger batches of drug product.